The Travellers course deals with ways of seeing, perceiving and portraying urban territories. Taking different perspectives, from architecture and visual art to urban theory, history and politics, the course enables student-travellers to create an urban portrait of a territory.

Every student is a traveller who embarks on a journey in a territory, both literal and metaphorical, and creates a work about the experience. Travellers produce a travelogue, in free-form that is to be discussed with the teaching team. This can be a written or visual essay, presented as a booklet, an exhibition of drawings, a performative lecture or a guided public walk for example. In doing so, students create an insightful and critical work on urban space and urbanisation.

Please apply with a short exposé, explaining your idea for a topic and suggest a possible travel route. Applications are accepted only in printed form. The number of students in the course is limited to 8.

My interest for the forest started with two observations: The first one was the fact that a quarter of the Zurich metropolitan area is covered by forest. Each location within the city of Zurich is a maximum of 3km away from the nearest forest. The image of Zurich’s urban landscape is dominated by the wooded moraine hillsides of the Uetli, Käfer, Zürich- and Zimmerberg, they surround the city and define its edge. The second fact that arose my interest for the forest was an article I read in 2015 about the forest, which included a survey about the question if forest protection should be relaxed. 10% were in favour of it, whereas 88% stated, “The forest is sacred to us.” The total number of participants in the survey was more than 10’000. What attracted my attention was not only the sheer number of people for whom the forest was important, but also the use of the word “sacred”. Somehow, it indicated a deeper relation between man and forest, one that wasn’t purely pragmatic. I wondered how this perception of the forest influenced the urban development of it. How was it possible, that in a country like Switzerland, where utilizable land has always been seen as a scarce and limited resource, the forest became sacrosanct?

It’s through a newspaper article that the question of mechanical snow systems arose. The last few winters have seen many smaller ski resorts struggling with very little snowfalls, showing the precarious economic balance of some alpine communities. Since the early nineties, we implemented what we called “mechanical snow systems” or “snow-culture” to provide skiing slopes with snow when needed. The recent dry and hot winters created a segregation between resorts with and without artificial snow. That difference is what the following essay tries to investigate. What is the impact of mechanical snow systems on Alpine Resorts?